Don't Sign Contracts with Confidentiality Clauses, says ARL - 6/11/2009 - Library Journal

 Don't Sign Contracts with Confidentiality Clauses, says ARL - 6/11/2009 - Library Journal

Don't Sign Contracts with Confidentiality Clauses, says ARL

Nondisclosure has "negative impact on effective negotiations"

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 6/11/2009

ARL urges members not to agree to restrictive contracts

• Will open negotiations work?
• Mechanism planned for collecting licensing and contract terms

Aiming to increase libraries' leverage in pricing and licensing negotiations, the board of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) urges member libraries to refrain from entering into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure or confidentiality clauses.

The hope is that more openness among libraries about analogous agreements at similar institutions will force vendors to offer more equitable deals all around.

Georgia Harper, scholarly communications advisor for the University of Texas at Austin, agreed, telling LJAN, "the more libraries one is able to talk to about what one is hearing from a vendor, the better to make decisions about the benefit versus the cost."

May not be enough
Harper also indicated, however, that this effort toward openness may not be enough on its own to revise the pricing standard downward over the long term. 
"[I]f the ARL goal were achieved, I feel certain the vendors would find other ways to maintain their margins," she said. "Like all successful players in a market economy, they have many strategies to build and sustain their income streams. If one source of revenue dries up or diminishes despite their efforts to keep it steady or increase it, they will create a new one or enhance an old one."

Sharing contract terms
Given that publicly funded institutions are more bound than private ones by disclosure requirements, it seems that the ARL statement is aimed primarily at the latter. But the statement also goes further with recommendations that apply equally to all kinds of institutions.

ARL libraries are urged at the outset to "share upon request from other libraries information contained in these agreements." 
The last line of the statement hints at something further, describing a proposed "mechanism by which [ARL] members can share information with one another about their agreements," to be established by ARL. 
Though no further details were available, this could mark the beginnings of an opt-in resource for collecting licensing terms, potentially saving librarians the significant effort of making requests of licensing terms from peer institutions.

Don't Sign Contracts with Confidentiality Clauses, says ARL - 6/11/2009 - Library Journal